This invention relates to communications among end user communication devices and more specifically to the processing of user data received by end user communication devices, especially but not limited to, wireless end user communication devices, which may be made by different manufacturers and/or have different operating systems.
Wireless communication devices are now prevalent throughout all developed countries of the world. Although cellular telephones are currently the most widespread, other types of wireless communication devices include personal digital assistants, laptop computers with Wi-Fi and/or telecommunication carrier communication support, and various types of “pads” that provide visual displays that are larger than conventional cellular telephones but typically smaller than the displays of a laptop computer. Wireless voice communications between mobile devices utilizing different types of communication protocols, e.g. analog, TDMA, CDMA, VoIP, etc., are supported by different telecommunication carriers which provide appropriate communication protocol interfaces/gateways to facilitate voice communications between mobile units using different communication protocols.
Various types of transport layer communication protocols are supported by wireless communication devices. For example, text messaging, short messaging service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), email such as by simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), and instant messaging utilizing hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) are available. Each type service is supported by a transport layer communication protocol that is part of the telecommunication signaling structure associated with the transport of user communications and the communication of telecommunication infrastructure commands and signals.
Received character-based communications are commonly processed on a destination device by an application that corresponds with the transport layer communication protocol of the received communication. For example, a received SMS message is processed by an SMS application (or dedicated module of a multipurpose program) resident on the destination device and is typically stored in one or more files/records that contain other SMS messages. Thus, it is common for a user of a mobile device to be able to view and access all received SMS messages as a common group, regardless of the subject matter contained in the received messages. Similarly, received email transmissions are processed by an email application on a destination device and are stored in one or more files/records that contain only email messages. While such processing is efficient, it does not offer the user flexibility to organize received information based on subject matter or other criteria. Even if the user is permitted to manually copy received character-based information of one type and transfer this copy to another file that contains information received using a different protocol, e.g. store a copy of an SMS message in a file than contains email messages, such a process is burdensome and time consuming to the user.